Renown game producer Shigeru Miyamoto retiring from current position at Nintendo

In an interview with Wired, Shigeru Miyamoto told the world that he will soon be retiring from his current position at Nintendo to one that is much less involved, possibly heading up a small team of young developers.

For those not familiar with Miyamoto, he is a legend of the industry. Without him the follow games and characters would never exist:

Mario

Donkey Kong

Pikmin

Starfox

Captain Falcon (F-Zero)

The Legend of Zelda

Miyamoto was also much more than just a game designer, for much of the last decade he was the face of Nintendo, often presenting new games and product lines at events like E3. He also was key to development on both the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS consoles and fostered in a new era of motion control gameplay.

Miyamoto holding Nintendo Wii controller

While the last notable original title I can think of from the man was Pikmin, back in 2001, he has been involved in many other high-profile Nintendo titles such as Super Mario Galaxy and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, of which he created the source games for back on arcade cabinets and the original NES console.

Its the end of an era for both Miyamoto and Nintendo and while it doesn’t look like he will be quitting the game design business, it does look like he will be much less involved in the future business of Nintendo, who I believe should feel extremely lucky to have someone so talented and insightful for so long.

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About Ryan Saul

Hailing from Portland, OR I work by day and blog by night. I like to consider myself a video game connoisseur, playing as many new things as I can get my hands on. Its hard to hold me down to one game for very long before I move on to the next big thing. Luckily, that works pretty well in terms of video game blogging.

2 responses to “Renown game producer Shigeru Miyamoto retiring from current position at Nintendo”

This is old and erroneous news…
Nintendo responded very quickly to the Wired interview stating that Miyamoto will not be stepping down. My understanding of the events is that after the announcement Nintendo’s stock started plumetting so they firmly responded that his position is not changing. Nintendo spun the statements made in the interview by saying that Miyamoto was not conveying himself clearly. That he was merely relating some of the idle talk he’s been sharing around the office that was actually intended to let the younger staff know that he’s not going to be around forever. That the intent was to prepare the next generation of developers at Nintendo of getting into the mindset of accepting bigger leadership roles in the future of the company.

I’ve been hearing some of the backlash too which is very interesting. I posted this before all of that surfaced however, or at least I wrote it before that was the case.

Here’s my take: he’s no longer going to be Grand Koomba or whatever the hell he was, he’s going to take a backseat at Nintendo and start working on small projects again. Not the big stuff like the latest Zelda or Mario. Surely he’ll still be on the board of directors or whatever version of that Nintendo has, but I got the impression that when Nintendo saw its stock slip they decided to convince everybody otherwise.